Area of Expertise:

Degree:

Prior to his doctoral studies, Professor Crawford worked on rural and agricultural development programs in Kenya for five years, initially as a Peace Corps volunteer. He joined the department at Michigan State in 1979 as a tenure-system assistant professor focusing on international agricultural development. He has taught graduate courses in farm management and benefit-cost analysis. He has been a core faculty member of the department’s USAID-funded rural development and food security projects in Africa since 1980. He worked in Senegal in 1983-86 under a department project with the Institute of Agricultural Research, focusing on farming systems research, fertilizer distribution, and food security policy.

His recent research has covered the evaluation of agricultural research impacts, determinants of farm productivity and investment, benefit-cost analysis of alternative strategies for promoting improved input use, and linking farm household models with climate change and crop models. From September 1992 through September 2006 he served as Associate Chairperson and graduate program coordinator. Since 2006, he has served as Co-Director of the Food Security Group within the department. He is also currently Director of MSU’s Global Center for Food Systems Innovation, and is a Co-PI on several international projects including the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Food Security Policy and the Grain Research and Innovation (GRAIN) project in Afghanistan. He was a member of a team, led by Thom Jayne, that received the Bruce Gardner Memorial Prize for Applied Policy Analysis from the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association in July 2017.